176 kg man with hypertension, asthma beats Covid after 55 days’ stay in ICU

MUMBAI: When financial analyst Jatin Sanghavi (46) got discharged from hospital on Christmas Day on Friday, he had defied most of the Covid-related theories gathered over the past nine months.
Global statistics show that patients with co-morbidities such as obesity, hypertension, asthma and sleep apnoea do not do well with Covid-19; the death rate among such patients is high.Sanghavi, a resident of Sion with all the above-mentioned risk factors, walked out of Bhatia Hospital, Tardeo, with a smile. He was also happy that his weight had dropped by 20 kg from the 176 kg earlier.
It was not easy. He was in the ICU for 55 days since admission to Bhatia Hospital on October 15. “If I had stayed a bit longer, I would have completed a platinum jubilee of sorts in the hospital,” he said.
Humour and interactions with the staff kept him sane.
“In these two months, I have seen many people who looked more stable than I did, pass away,” he said. For his sanity, he would frequently video-chat with his family and he struck a friendship with many of the ICU staff.
Medically, Sanghavi was not easy to treat, said Dr Manish Mavani and Dr Sujeet Rajan. “When he was brought in, his oxygen saturation was 60 or so, and due to his frame we couldn’t put him through a CT scan to find out the extent of infection in his lungs,” Dr Mavani said.
He needed non-invasive ventilator support for 50 days. He could not be turned in the bed easily, so the team was worried about bed sores. “He was given remdesivir for 10 days as well as plasma transfusion,” Dr Mavani said.
Pulmonologist Dr Sujeet Rajan said that given Sanghavi's history with asthma and sleep apnea, “we were not sure we could salvage him”. He started him on special anti-fibrotic medicines to reduce the damage to the lungs. “His mental strength helped him immensely,” Dr Rajan said.
Sanghavi will need medications and physiotherapy to get over the Covid effects on his body. “We have found that patients with co-morbidities take longer to heal. Even the post-Covid effect lingers on,” intensivist Dr Rahul Pandit, also a member of the state task force on Covid-19, said.